The device that will succeed in reinventing television has to conquer a devilishly simple task: deliver the entertainment you want, as quickly as possible.

Amazon.com has taken a significant step in that direction with its new Fire TV set-top box, though it has yet to fully crack the problem. Fire TV’s impressive evolution of the TV-watching experience is a remote control that lets you quickly search a world of Internet video, game and app content with only your voice.

With Fire TV, getting from an idea—say, let’s watch an old “Star Trek” episode—to full phaser action on your big screen has never been faster. But it comes with a price: your devotion to Amazon.

Unveiled this week for $99, Fire TV enters a market for video-streaming devices that has no clear leader, but fierce competition from Apple TV, Roku and Google’s Chromecast—as well as TiVo, Microsoft’s Xbox, Sony’s PlayStation and the “smart TVs” and connected Blu-ray players that all have the capability to stream media from the Internet.

Amazon’s box isn’t the cheapest—that honor goes to the $35 Chromecast stick, which you control with your phone. (Runner up is Roku’s recently announced $50 HDMI stick of its own, which comes with a remote.)

Fire TV has made the most progress on the interface experience, however. The device wisely puts the media front and center in a series of tiles that shows you what you’ve watched recently, what’s on your wish list, or what you should be watching, based on Amazon’s algorithmic recommendations for movies and TV shows.

But the control that matters the most on Fire TV is voice search. Press a button on the top of the remote, and the TV dings to let you know the box is listening. Say out loud the name of a show, film, actor or other keyword, and after a quick moment, Fire TV will show on the screen what it thinks you said. Click a button on the remote control to agree, and Fire TV will show a list of content that fits the query.

Amazon’s voice recognition technology isn’t perfect, but I found it to be almost as accurate as Apple’s Siri virtual assistant. (Neither quite get it when I say “George Takei,” the Starship Enterprise helmsman turned Internet meme impresario.) Fire TV isn’t the first device to bring voice commands to a TV, but it is the most straightforward and useful.

Click to compare Amazon’s Fire TV to the Apple TV, Google’s Chromecast and the Roku 3.

I vastly prefer voice search to the alternatives: hunting through on-screen apps for content, waving your hands around in front of a camera, or typing in keywords through repeated clicks on a remote or a tiny keyboard. Being able to easily search for keywords is liberating; I only wish Fire TV’s voice control also took commands, like “play most recent episode of ‘Scandal.’”

While Fire TV doesn’t yet have access to HBO Go—the company says it is working on it—my biggest criticism is that search results mostly rely on Amazon’s catalog of movies and TV shows, many of which you have to pay to watch.

You can use Fire TV to stream content from other services, such as Netflix and even Showtime, if you’re a subscriber—but their offerings don’t show up in search results. A search for “Star Trek” lets me buy episodes for $2.99 from Amazon—and offers a handful of “free” options for those who already pay $99 a year for Amazon’s Prime subscription service—but fails to mention I could watch them free via Netflix. You end up feeling like Amazon is trying to sell you things, a problem that also haunts Apple TV.

An Amazon spokeswoman said the company is working to develop more of a universal search across services and will “add more search partners” over time. Amazon already incorporates content from Hulu Plus into some listings. So a search for “Scandal” will offer Hulu Plus subscribers the opportunity to watch the most recent shows from the current season free, though it still isn’t smart enough to actually take me straight to those free episodes. I had to dig for them.

Amazon sorely lags behind Roku in this universal capability. It’s Roku’s independence—offering up content from thousands of streaming providers, with no particular allegiance—that makes it the Switzerland of streaming boxes, and still superior for anybody who hasn’t invested in Amazon’s digital media.

For the real TV lover, digital video recorder TiVo Roamio offers even more impressive search across recordable live TV, Internet streaming services and even cable content offered on-demand. For me, TiVo is as close as it gets to one box that rules them all, though the company charges a monthly fee.

Amazon’s other big advantage is that Fire TV doubles as a videogame box, which you operate through the remote or optional game-style controller. Its offerings won’t impress people used to the very latest sophisticated console games, but may be just enough for more casual gamers. (The $99 Roku 3 has “Angry Birds” and other games, plus a motion-controllable remote, though Amazon is developing its own games and has more established relationships with gaming partners from its Kindle Fire tablet line.)

The set-top box wars are just getting going. Apple TV is now falling behind, but there’s still room for Apple to re-imagine the media experience in a future product. At the moment, if you’re already in a relationship with Amazon and its content, the $99 Fire TV is a worthwhile addition to your home.